Archives for February 11, 2008

Dynamism is a new label for a new political philosophy, a philosophy that Virginia Postrel explains in her 1998 book, ‘The Future and Its Enemies – The Growing Conflict over Creativity, Enterprise and Progress’, has given us greater wealth, opportunity and choice than at any time in history.

According to Postrel many conservatives and social liberals (members of the right and left of politics) have much in common as they want to control the future while Dynamists believe in the capacity of human beings to improve their lives through trial and error, spontaneous adjustment, adaptation and evolution.

That’s some of what I wrote in Part 1, of ‘Why I am a Dynamist’. I thought some of the comments in the thread that followed were interesting with Gavin suggesting that “dynamic change could lead to chaos.”

It is worth remembering, the evolution of life on earth has been a dynamic process with no-one in control and yet it has not lead to chaos.

Dynamists see the same potential in human enterprise provided there is a reliable foundation on which to build complex, ever-adapting structures that incorporate local knowledge.

Postrel suggests that some of those structures will be elaborate new schemes of rules:

“But the rules will be voluntarily subscribed to, allowed to evolve, and able to incorporate detailed knowledge of particulars. … and they should not be confused with the fundamental rules that, in fact, allow such specific-purpose rules to develop.”

Postrel suggests that respect for local knowledge and rules can avoid the tragedy of the commons:

“Grazing land and fishing sites are classic examples of commons. Economic theory predicts that such common property will be overused, since everyone has an incentive to draw as much as possible from it rather than to conserve. But Elinor Ostrom [Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action, Cambridge University Press, 1990] finds many examples of cooperative institutions evolving to regulate commons use effectively, to everyone’s benefit … developed through trial-and-error learning, with the rules made by the same people who must abide them.”

About 250 million year ago, during the late Permian the world’s oceans stagnated causing a huge and lethal build up of hydrogen sulphide produced by anaerobic bacteria. Up to 95 percent of marine species and 85 percent of those on the land went extinct.

At least that is the view of Peter Ward writing in last week’s issue of New Scientist (Precambian strikes back, February 9, 2008)

The oceans stagnated because global warming from massive emissions of greenhouse gases from sustained volcanic eruptions warmed the high latitudes more than the equator, slowing the ocean currents.

A reader of this weblog, Dr Steve Short, recommends everyone read the article:

“This subject is not only close to my personal interests (as a geochemist) but raises some very interesting issues I have been mulling over for some years about the immense significance of the ‘partnership’ which actually applies on Earth between oxygen-breathing animal life and the oxygen-creating and CO2-absorbing cyanobacteria and plant kingdoms and the roles of methanogens and sulfur reducing bacteria.

I am coming round to the view that this is the real paradigm which the human race needs to embrace in order to manage issues such as AGW (if it actually exists) and (perhaps more importantly) the levels of dissolved CO2 and O2 in the surface layers of the ocean and the sustainability of the continental plant biomass.

Realization of this over-arching paradigm has deep implications for how we look at coal, oil and gas, how we may re-create it sustainably, how we manage our partnership with the oceanic cyanobacteria, the sea floor methanogens and continental plants in a truly intelligent and symbiotic way.

In my view this article might almost be classed as seminal, so profound are the issues which it raises in a popular science context.”